(Eu) somos lived experience of pregnancy and medicalization

Abstract

In the past fifty years, pregnancy has gained a lot of interest in social sciences in correspondence with the surge of the body as systematic category of analysis. The pregnant body seems to become a hyper-body on which simultaneously operate biopolitics, economic forces and social imaginaries, all engaged in the creation of a new, dynamic ethic of reproduction. This thesis is an in-depth exploration of the unfolding of my lived experience of pregnancy on the background of the biomedical landscape. Moreover, it analyses the sharing of this experience with three pregnant women that, like me, immigrated in Portugal. It is developed within a phenomenological and critical frame, and takes the form of a dialogue, a dialectical alternation between the autoethnography of my pregnancy and the reflections it triggered in terms of embodiment, medicalization and socialization. The pregnant embodiment that emerges is a liminal one: challenging postulates of subjectivity and individuality, it reflects the complexity of being at once an “I”, (eu) and an “us” (somos).

Nos últimos 50 anos a gravidez tem se revelado um assunto relevante na área das ciências sociais.